1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer virtualization and, in particular, to a method and system for improving the accuracy of timing and process accounting within virtual machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advantages of virtual machine technology have become widely recognized. Among these advantages is the ability to run multiple virtual machines on a single host platform. This makes better use of the capacity of the hardware, while still ensuring that each user enjoys the features of a “complete” computer. Depending on how it is implemented, virtualization can also provide greater security, since the virtualization can isolate potentially unstable or unsafe software so that it cannot adversely affect the hardware state or system files required for running the physical (as opposed to virtual) hardware.
Virtualized Computer Systems
As is well known in the field of computer science, a virtual machine (VM) is an abstraction—a “virtualization”—of an actual physical computer system. FIG. 1 shows one possible arrangement of a computer system 700 that implements virtualization. A virtual machine (VM) or “guest” 200 is installed on a “host platform,” or simply “host,” which will include a system hardware, that is, a hardware platform 100, and one or more layers or co-resident components comprising system-level software, such as an operating system or similar kernel, or a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor (see below), or some combination of these.
Each VM 200 will typically have both virtual system hardware 201 and guest system software 202. The virtual system hardware typically includes at least one virtual CPU, virtual memory 230, at least one virtual disk 240, and one or more virtual devices 270. Note that a disk—virtual or physical—is also a “device,” but is usually considered separately because of the important role of the disk. All of the virtual hardware components of the VM may be implemented in software using known techniques to emulate the corresponding physical components. The guest system software includes a guest operating system (OS) 220 and drivers 224 as needed for the various virtual devices 270.
Note that a single VM may be configured with more than one virtualized processor. To permit computer systems to scale to larger numbers of concurrent threads, systems with multiple CPUs have been developed. These symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems are available as extensions of the PC platform and from other vendors. Essentially, an SMP system is a hardware platform that connects multiple processors to a shared main memory and shared I/O devices. Virtual machines may also be configured as SMP VMs. FIG. 1, for example, illustrates multiple virtual processors 210-0, 210-1, . . . , 210-m (VCPU0, VCPU1, . . . , VCPUm) (collectively, 210) within the VM 200.
Yet another configuration is found in a so-called “multi-core” architecture, in which more than one physical CPU is fabricated on a single chip, with its own set of functional units (such as a floating-point unit and an arithmetic/logic unit ALU), and can execute threads independently; multi-core processors typically share only very limited resources, such as some cache. Still another technique that provides for simultaneous execution of multiple threads is referred to as “simultaneous multi-threading,” in which more than one logical CPU (hardware thread) operates simultaneously on a single chip, but in which the logical CPUs flexibly share not only one or more caches, but also some functional unit(s) and sometimes also the translation lookaside buffer (TLB). This invention may be used regardless of the type—physical and/or logical—or number of processors included in a VM.
If the VM 200 is properly designed, applications 260 running on the VM will function as they would if run on a “real” computer, even though the applications are running at least partially indirectly, that is via the guest OS 220 and virtual processor(s). Executable files will be accessed by the guest OS from the virtual disk 240 or virtual memory 230, which will be portions of the actual physical disk 140 or memory 130 allocated to that VM. Once an application is installed within the VM, the guest OS retrieves files from the virtual disk just as if the files had been pre-stored as the result of a conventional installation of the application. The design and operation of virtual machines are well known in the field of computer science.
Some interface is generally required between the guest software within a VM and the various hardware components and devices in the underlying hardware platform. This interface—referred to in this text as “virtualization software”—may include one or more software components and/or layers, possibly including one or more of the software components known in the field of virtual machine technology as “virtual machine monitors” (VMMs), “hypervisors,” or virtualization “kernels.” Because virtualization terminology has evolved over time and has not yet become fully standardized, these terms do not always provide clear distinctions between the software layers and components to which they refer. For example, “hypervisor” is often used to describe both a VMM and a kernel together, either as separate but cooperating components or with one or more VMMs incorporated wholly or partially into the kernel itself; however, “hypervisor” is sometimes used instead to mean some variant of a VMM alone, which interfaces with some other software layer(s) or component(s) to support the virtualization. Moreover, in some systems, some virtualization code is included in at least one “superior” VM to facilitate the operations of other VMs. Furthermore, specific software support for VMs may be included in the host OS itself. Unless otherwise indicated, the invention described below may be used in virtualized computer systems having any type or configuration of virtualization software.
Moreover, FIG. 1 shows virtual machine monitors that appear as separate entities from other components of the virtualization software. Furthermore, some software components used to implemented one illustrated embodiment of the invention are shown and described as being within a “virtualization layer” located logically between all virtual machines and the underlying hardware platform and/or system-level host software. This virtualization layer can be considered part of the overall virtualization software, although it would be possible to implement at least part of this layer in specialized hardware. The illustrated embodiments are given only for the sake of simplicity and clarity and by way of illustration—as mentioned above, the distinctions are not always so clear-cut. Again, unless otherwise indicated or apparent from the description, it is to be assumed that the invention can be implemented anywhere within the overall structure of the virtualization software, and even in systems that provide specific hardware support for virtualization.
The various virtualized hardware components in the VM, such as the virtual CPU(s), the virtual memory 230, the virtual disk 240, and the virtual device(s) 270, are shown as being part of the VM 200 for the sake of conceptual simplicity. In actuality, these “components” are usually implemented as software emulations included in the VMM. One advantage of such an arrangement is that the VMM may (but need not) be set up to expose “generic” devices, which facilitate VM migration and hardware platform-independence.
Different systems may implement virtualization to different degrees—“virtualization” generally relates to a spectrum of definitions rather than to a bright line, and often reflects a design choice with respect to a trade-off between speed and efficiency on the one hand and isolation and universality on the other hand. For example, “full virtualization” is sometimes used to denote a system in which no software components of any form are included in the guest other than those that would be found in a non-virtualized computer; thus, the guest OS could be an off-the-shelf, commercially available OS with no components included specifically to support use in a virtualized environment.
In contrast, another concept, which has yet to achieve a universally accepted definition, is that of “para-virtualization.” As the name implies, a “para-virtualized” system is not “fully” virtualized, but rather the guest is configured in some way to provide certain features that facilitate virtualization. For example, the guest in some para-virtualized systems is designed to avoid hard-to-virtualize operations and configurations, such as by avoiding certain privileged instructions, certain memory address ranges, etc. As another example, many para-virtualized systems include an interface within the guest that enables explicit calls to other components of the virtualization software.
For some, para-virtualization implies that the guest OS (in particular, its kernel) is specifically designed to support such an interface. According to this view, having, for example, an off-the-shelf version of Microsoft Windows XP as the guest OS would not be consistent with the notion of para-virtualization. Others define para-virtualization more broadly to include any guest OS with any code that is specifically intended to provide information directly to any other component of the virtualization software. According to this view, loading a module such as a driver designed to communicate with other virtualization components renders the system para-virtualized, even if the guest OS as such is an off-the-shelf, commercially available OS not specifically designed to support a virtualized computer system. Unless otherwise indicated or apparent, this invention is not restricted to use in systems with any particular “degree” of virtualization and is not to be limited to any particular notion of full or partial (“para-”) virtualization.
In addition to the sometimes fuzzy distinction between full and partial (para-) virtualization, two arrangements of intermediate system-level software layer(s) are in general use—a “hosted” configuration and a non-hosted configuration (which is shown in FIG. 1). In a hosted virtualized computer system, an existing, general-purpose operating system forms a “host” OS that is used to perform certain input/output (I/O) operations, alongside and sometimes at the request of the VMM. The Workstation product of VMware, Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., is an example of a hosted, virtualized computer system, which is also explained in U.S. Pat. No. 6,496,847 (Bugnion, et al., “System and Method for Virtualizing Computer Systems,” 17 Dec. 2002).
As illustrated in FIG. 1, in many cases, it may be beneficial to deploy VMMs on top of a software layer—a kernel 600—constructed specifically to provide efficient support for the VMs. This configuration is frequently referred to as being “non-hosted.” Compared with a system in which VMMs run directly on the hardware platform, use of a kernel offers greater modularity and facilitates provision of services (for example, resource management) that extend across multiple virtual machines. Compared with a hosted deployment, a kernel may offer greater performance because it can be co-developed with the VMM and be optimized for the characteristics of a workload consisting primarily of VMs/VMMs. The kernel 600 also handles any other applications running on it that can be separately scheduled, as well as a console operating system that, in some architectures, is used to boot the system and facilitate certain user interactions with the virtualization software.
Note that the kernel 600 is not the same as the kernel that will be within the guest OS 220—as is well known, every operating system has its own kernel. Note also that the kernel 600 is part of the “host” platform of the VM/VMM as defined above even though the configuration shown in FIG. 1 is commonly termed “non-hosted;” moreover, the kernel may be both part of the host and part of the virtualization software or “hypervisor.” The difference in terminology is one of perspective and definitions that are still evolvng in the art of virtualization.
Problems of Timer Virtualization
Common, commercially available off-the-shelf operating systems, that is, “commodity” OSs, including Linux and Windows, generally depend on periodic timer interrupts for two important activities. First, the OS advances its notion of real time in response to each timer interrupt; elapsed real time since the OS was booted is often maintained as a simple count of timer “ticks, where each tick corresponds to the amount of time between two timer interrupts.
Second, the OS performs statistical process accounting by charging the process (a schedulable entity within the guest OS; the exact terminology—process, thread, or task—depends on the particular guest OS) that was running while the timer interrupt occurred for consuming a timer tick's worth of CPU time: When a timer interrupt occurs, the OS determines which process was running at the moment the interrupt arrived, and it attributes one tick worth of CPU time to that process; this may also be termed “delivering” the interrupt “to” or “into” or “in the context of” the process. Of course, that process may not have been running for a whole tick, but because timer interrupts are approximately randomly distributed relative to when processes start and stop, the results are statistically valid—the amount of time attributed to a given process over the long term is approximately correct. Note that this also applies to a process executing an idle loop, and to the timer sponge process according to the invention (see below) as well.
In a virtualized environment, where such a commodity OS is run within a VM as the guest OS, both of these activities may be adversely affected by the virtualization of timer interrupts. When many VMs are running on a single physical machine, managed by the host OS or on some component of the virtualization software, hardware CPU resources are time-multiplexed, with the result that a given VM may be descheduled for relatively long periods of time. When the VM is run after being descheduled, however, it may have accumulated a backlog of timer interrupts corresponding to the elapsed real time during which it was descheduled. For example, with a timer period of 10 milliseconds, if the VM is descheduled for 50 milliseconds, it will be “behind” by 5 timer interrupts when it resumes execution.
Descheduling a VM to run other VMs is probably the most common scenario in which a VM may “fall behind” and accumulate a backlog of timer interrupts, but other aspects of virtualized environments may also result in the same problem. For example, virtualization overhead or delays due to blocking I/O may sometimes be large enough to cause a VM to fall behind due to “self-induced” overhead, even if it is never forcibly descheduled due to contention for CPU time.
One way to “handle” backlogged timer interrupts is simply to have a policy of not handling them at all, but rather simply to drop them and accept that, with respect to VMs, the guest OS's notion of time may lag real time. Some existing virtualization systems, however, implement a backlogged interrupt policy to help a guest that is behind “catch up” to real time by delivering its backlog of timer interrupts at some faster rate. However, this will often distort the guest's statistical process accounting, unfairly attributing descheduled time to whatever processes happened to be running while the catch-up interrupts are delivered. This distortion is especially problematic for workload management software (such as popular commercial offerings from BMC, IBM, and Computer Associates) running in the guest OS, which depends on accurate per-process CPU accounting.
An additional problem with catch-up approaches is ensuring that virtual timer interrupts aren't delivered to the guest OS so quickly that the next timer interrupt is raised while an earlier one is still pending, that is, still being processed, which would not occur in a “normal” system, that is, one in which the OS is receiving timer interrupts directly from hardware. Similarly, delivering catch-up timer interrupts also runs the risk of triggering guest OS bugs by violating timing assumptions that are reasonable on physical machines, for example, causing interrupts to nest by delivering the next timer interrupt while the guest OS is still handling an earlier one.
There is therefore a need for a mechanism that accurately represents guest and host CPU utilization as observed from within the guest; this information can be used, for example, by industry standard performance monitoring and process accounting tools. There is also a need to improve guest timekeeping with respect to real time in a manner that preserves guest stability by respecting guest OS limitations related to acceptable timer interrupt spacing. This invention provides a mechanism that meets these needs.